MEDIA DIET
By:
August 21, 2026
A weekly series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — HILOBROW’s friends and contributors — whose “output” we admire.
Devin has been a valued HILOBROW contributor since 2012. His first post was on the topic of EDWARD THOMAS. His most recent contributions to this publication include: THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA | NEVER SAY NEVER | IDAHO TRANSFER.
Gettysburg, PA…
HILOBROW: What music — genres, particular artists and songs — do you listen to during a typical day?
DEVIN MCKINNEY: I listen to playlists of longtime favorites — various genres, early ’60s–early ’90s — on my iPod. It’s all familiar and it’s all I seem to need. New additions come via TV soundtracks: Orange is the New Black and The End of the F***ing World and I Am Not Okay with This and Black Mirror have dropped songs on me that I couldn’t believe.
In the car I switch between satellite stations devoted to Beatles, ’60s, ’70s, 1st Wave, and Classic Vinyl; if they’re all playing crap, I switch off. Sometimes of a weekend I’ll listen to old records — un-sleeving and re-sleeving a stack of LPs or 45s, studying pictures, reading liner notes, flipping and feeling, while tethered to the turntable by a headphone cord. It’s a dedicated project, the cord a connection to the past.
HILOBROW: Do you subscribe to any magazines or newsletters that you’d strongly recommend?
DEVIN MCKINNEY: I subscribe to the New York Times, American Prospect, Guardian, New Yorker (mostly for the archives), and Greil Marcus’s Substack, the only thing I’ll drop everything to read.
HILOBROW: How do you use social media, these days?
DEVIN MCKINNEY: My algorithm has made Facebook largely unstomachable. On Instagram, the ads aren’t as smothering and the outlook is cheerier. People do yoga, walk slacklines, pursue comedy careers, wear amazing clothes, paint themselves up. Per Kim Gordon, I like to watch people be free — or pretend to be, which can amount to the same thing. And I adore cats and goats. A needed reminder that the whole world doesn’t exist in my head, or in Trump’s.
I never watch or listen to the news. I don’t want to hear the lies being uttered, or stare at the flabby jowls, steroid sweat, and dead eyes of the people uttering them.
HILOBROW: What’s the best TV series you’ve seen recently?
DEVIN MCKINNEY: Breaking Bad. Hot messes can be great, chaos can be cleansing, but straight narrative this exquisitely written, paced, and portrayed thrills and moves me. I expect to be rewatching it forever.
HILOBROW: What forms of media do you “take in” the most regularly/frequently, during a typical day or week?
DEVIN MCKINNEY: Books. Age brings patience, and a physical hunger for text. One balances scholarly perseverance against a whimsical infatuation with newfound books and authors.
I try to read fiction indiscriminately, both famous and forgotten, “classics” and “trash.” Robert Aickman’s “strange stories” consumed me recently. I’m reading Nabokov’s collected stories now; he’s an intoxicant to me. I like old gay and lesbian pulp fiction, obscure ghost stories, and neglected novels that inspired famous movies. Most of my nonfiction is true crime, post-WWII US history, or random studies in human eccentricity.
Here’s a way of surmounting big books you feared you’d never read: calculate a modest daily quota (say, 10–20 pages), and stick to it. Use your reading schedule as a bookmark, crossing off the days as you go, and a few weeks or months later, you’re done. In this way I’ve gotten In Search of Lost Time, Finnegans Wake, The Rosy Crucifixion, Thomas Wolfe (God, he’s terrible!), several trilogies, a couple of Dostoevskys, and numerous other should-have-reads under my belt.
HILOBROW: What work of nonfiction (old or new) would you recommend to someone trying to make sense of today’s world?
DEVIN MCKINNEY: Recently I loved Robert Crichton’s two books about Ferdinand De Mara, famed in the 1950s for impersonating a priest, a college dean, a naval surgeon, a prison warden, etc. Like Trump, DeMara was an inveterate liar and man-infant who, when called out, responded not with contrition but with belligerence and rage, even contempt for anyone foolish enough to have believed him. Then he made money off it all. Does it explain? No. Illuminate? Yes, somehow.
HILOBROW: What work of literature (old or new) would you recommend to someone trying to make sense of today’s world?
DEVIN MCKINNEY: Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire, seven novels spanning the American Revolution to the Cold War. Class-A historical fiction, rich and bursting, full of acid and acumen. Vidal cuts the crap while widening the scope, reminding you that even the unique nightmare that is now has a context, a continuum. That helps. And the writing is funny as hell. What else do you want, world peace?
MEDIA DIET series: MATTHEW BATTLES | ADRIENNE CREW | HOLLY INTERLANDI | CAROLYN KELLOGG | MARK KINGWELL | FLOURISH KLINK | ADAM McGOVERN | CHARLIE MITCHELL | TOM NEALON | ANNIE NOCENTI | GARY PANTER | LYNN PERIL | JONATHAN PINCHERA | NICHOLAS ROMBES | CARLO ROTELLA | LUCY SANTE | SETH | MIKE WATT | JUDITH ZISSMAN | & more to come! Visit the SERIES INDEX.